Here’s How Your Hair Dryer Can Help You Roast Chicken

Helen Rosner, a food writer for the New Yorker, took an unusual approach to roasting chicken. Instead of just using an oven like us normal folks, Rosner decided to use her hair dryer. And not just any hair dryer—a $400 Dyson Supersonic. That thing will blow a chicken a to a crisp.

When she posted about this experience on social media, her post went viral almost immediately, garnering 1,600 likes and nearly 300 comments on Twitter. Naturally, people were curious, and maybe a little confused. According to Rosner, this unorthodox method helps achieve maximum skin crispiness. The blow dryer’s fan helps eliminate moisture more rapidly, thus helping create an ideal crisp texture before it actually gets roasted. So keep this hack in mind before you make your next Sunday dinner. You can get her recipe here.

Happy snow day, I am using an astonishingly expensive hair dryer to remove all moisture from a chicken to maximize skin crispiness when I roast it. pic.twitter.com/ngtzmoOSHf

The science behind her reasoning actually checks out and it turns out Rosner is far from the first person to make chicken with appliances that seem better suited to personal grooming. (Though she may be the first person to successfully tweet about it, so that counts for something.) Apparently cookbook author Marcella Hazan attempted to popularize the idea in the 1970s, but it never took off.

But does Rosner actually use the hair dryer for its intended purpose as well? You can rest assure that she does. According to an interview with Allure, Rosner said, “The fact that it’s way, way, way better at drying my hair than any other dryer I’ve tried is just a bonus. The fact that it helps my roast chicken be so great is a double bonus.”

The next time you blow dry your hair, take a minute to marvel at just how functional that hair dryer is after. You may even want to store it in the kitchen.

Header photo courtesy Shutterstock.

Jessica is an Associate Editor at Chowhound. Follow her on Twitter @volume_knob for updates on snacks and cats.